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Editorial

Volume 34, Number 2, October 2002

Framing research
Richard Edwards, University of Stirling, UK

This edition of Studies marks a transition in a number of ways. First, this is the first time the journal is available in electronic as well as hard copy format. Second, we mark an increase in subscription fees and a change in their structure. Third, we advertise for a new Editor.

The move to an electronic as well as hard copy version of Studies is important in a world in which communication is increasingly mediated by information and communications technologies. Most of our sister journals have had the dual presentational form for a while now and there are a number of reasons why it is desirable to be available through the World Wide Web. Experience from elsewhere suggests that electronic journals attract a geographically wider readership. While the subscription base for Studies is already international, this tends to be concentrated in only certain countries. The Editorial Board welcomes the opportunity for wider engagement. Related to this is the desire that in extending the readership, we will also extend the authorship in the journal. Studies wants to see high quality research and scholarship from places other than the UK represented in its pages. We have had some success with this over the years, but once again, this has been geographically concentrated. We hope the wider availability through the Web will encourage a wider range of contributors to the conversations that we seek to foster in and through Studies.

Inevitably, innovation entails costs and this is reflected in the rise in subscription rates for the journal. However, since I became Editor in 1998, the subscription levels have stayed the same and, while this has ensured accessibility, it has also acted as a constraint on development. The Editorial Board, in conjunction with the publisher NIACE, therefore feel that the combined addition of an electronic format and a modest increase in subscription rates is a fair response to the situation. However, as ever, we do have a concern about access to the journal. For that reason, we have introduced a three-tier subscription rate to ensure colleagues in less well resourced circumstances can subscribe to the journal.

The third transition we mark here begins the process of seeking a new Editor for Studies. My second three-year term finishes at the end of 2003, at which point I will have done two terms, the maximum allowed. The Editorial Board has produced a job description for potential applicants and there is an appointment procedure, which we hope will give the new Editor the opportunity to shadow me for a few months. Details are laid out in the advertisement later on in this edition of Studies. Potential applicants are welcome to contact me to find out more about ‘what it’s really like’ to be the Editor if they are interested in applying for the post. I commend it as an extremely valuable and interesting role.

And so to the title of this Editorial. As so often, the theme for my musings emerges from my reading and editing of the texts included in this edition of Studies. Why have I used the notions of framing? Inevitably, it involves wordplay. On the one hand, all research and scholarship makes certain assumptions. These can be either implicit or explicit. They are both conceptual and methodological. Such assumptions help to frame a particular piece of writing, to put some things in the picture and, in the process, exclude others. Framing is therefore integral to research and scholarly practices, such as those we engage in when writing for journals. Thus, in this edition, for instance, Julia Clarke makes explicit an argument for the conceptual framing of research drawing upon actor-network theory, a set of ideas unfamiliar to most in the educational research community. By contrast, there are implicit conceptual and methodological assumptions to be revealed in the accounts of Jane Cruikshank and Edward Taylor respectively. Cruikshank’s conceptual framing is drawn from critical theory. Taylor discusses research methods, but assumes a methodological framing, thereby certain possibilities for different forms of data analysis and interpretation of data out of the picture.

Thus, the second sense of framing I am using. To frame someone is to set someone up, to make it appear that they did something for which they were not responsible. It is to do something underhand. Now, I am not suggesting that any in the adult education and lifelong learning communities would do anything underhand. However, to consider the framing of research is to adopt a suspicious – even critical – attitude towards what is presented. What is presented? What are the assumptions? What is excluded? What is the nature of the evidence? Are the claims supported by the evidence?

Here I am making my own assumptions, of course, framing issues as though they are part of a universal picture that we can all share. And being underhand, as my own assumptions lead me to a position in which the one thing I know is that I don’t know how we can be so certain. Thus, my own interest in actor-network theory, chaos and complexity as framings in contrast to those, for instance, which assume structure, agency and ideology. Thus, my concern at the continuation of narratives of historical struggle and seeming calls for one last push to transform the worldly condition, at one level worldly and worthy, at another unworldly, if wordy. And, in writing this, I frame the contributions, if not the contributors, to this edition of Studies.

And a third sense of framing? The research method Taylor discusses is photography… Editing the text started me thinking!